One Lonely Racoon in the Annex

People are stupid. It's a freakin' raccoon. If it climbed UP the pole, obviously it can climb DOWN. It was just waiting for everyone to go away and stop staring at it.

Hrrmmm... Any news on the matter?

The Toronto Sun has a story.

The racoon got down. Last night, I had a crazy adventure trying to get it to come down. Me and two other guys (Alex and Josh) watched the city's agencies (police, fire, Animal Services, etc.) balk at any reasonable attempt to help the racoon. To add insult to injury, all the goodwill of neighbours who placed cardboard, mattresses, etc around the post was bulldozed away by City of Toronto personnel. When everyone left the scene at about 2:00am, the three of us borrowed a ladder from the kind folks at Dominion, got up onto the roof and tried to place the ladder across... but it was 4ft too short. #$@! Incidentally, the local grocer at Walmer/Bloor had a longer ladder that would have been ideal, but they were totally unwilling to lend it to us and rudely asked us to leave (shocking, as we thought the "small ma and pa" grocer would be a caring small ma and pa grocer...). Now with no ladder option, Plan B involved the simplest and seemingly most effective solution - we placed a smorgasbord of sliced apples and peanut butter/jam on crackers onto the two new mattresses that were put down long after the city's bulldozer departed. After a few dry runs, at about six am, the racoon made its way down the pole.

I'm so tired now, having been up all night. I plan to post more details about this soon.

Hey Lee, nice one mate! Poor critter. You probably saved its life.

Thanks for the kind words... The three of us were so happy that the raccoon made it out alive. Needless to say, this was one of the craziest nights of my life and, as Tanja posted - it's a short film waiting to happen. I'm already writing it!

I love Torontoians

Hey Ivan- if you could see that light poll- where raccoon was sitting- you would not give such comment- If an animal climbed up- it DOES NOT mean tha it can climb back down at all, besides it is very unlikely that that raccoon could climb that light poll on his own- it could have jump on it from near buy roof- in any case- look at cats, for instance, sometimes they got scared off and climbe the trees and than siting there and meawing untill some one helps it. So dude ......

Well... this is interesting, a year later and i manage to come across this site. Last year around this time i remember looking up as one of the first people to realize the raccoon was on the pole to begin with, when me and another person called for help and no one responded we decided to call the media. I think it was the best thing i could have done. Thanks all for posting, it made my year... yours truly the local Grocery gal who named the Raccoon "Supersave" Helen Z.